On the plains of Montana and across the West, wildlife biologist David Jachowski spent a decade trying to save the black-footed ferret.

"By preserving black-footed ferrets, we aren't just preserving a single animal or species, we are preserving an identity for the land. Even more, an identity for a country," Jachowski wrote in a new account of the rare species and efforts, both his and others' to save it.

"The story of ferret recovery is an engaging one, perhaps one of the most remarkable conservation stories in the United States. Their plight simply grabbed me from a young age and pulled me into a part of the world I never thought I would learn to love or for which I would live to fight so dearly."

In the late 1800s on transcontinental train treks, naturalist C. Hart Merriam found prairie dogs abundant across the Great Plains and described accounts of a 25,000-square-mile colony in Texas that was home to an estimated 400 million prairie dogs, according to Jachowski's "Wild Again: The Struggle to Save the Black-Footed Ferret."

With at least 1.8 million to 2.5 million years on the prairie, the prairie dog was abundant enough to allow evolution of one of the world's most specialized carnivores. With the human footprint ever expanding, the increasingly homogenized landscape favors the generalist now, the raccoon or dandelion.

When farmers and ranchers moved into the plains, they started an eradication campaign against the prairie dog, with Texas and Kansas even going so far as to legislate fines for landowners who didn't clear prairie dog colonies from their lands. The federal government took on the cause for public lands.

"Prairie dog poisoning became a full-time job for thousands of people. Eradication was a sure-fire campaign platform for any governor or congressman in a prairie state," Jachowski wrote. "Poisoning was both politically popular and well funded in order to remove an 'impediment to the economic development of the west.'"

From 1915-1965, western states eliminated more than 37 million acres of prairie dog towns, leaving only tiny pockets, many of which are still targeted by government-sponsored poisoning campaigns, Jachowski said.

Likely the rarest species in existence, the black-footed ferret was elusive even when the prairie dog was plentiful. Lewis and Clark didn't see one.

Only in 1950, did trapper Ralph Block send the Smithsonian natural history museum their first black-footed ferret specimen. Block was in the middle of a campaign to eradicate prairie dogs from more than 34,000 acres around Rosebud, where landowners complained the prairie dogs kept the grass trimmed to nearly bare dirt.

Restoration efforts began, oddly enough, with the Disney's 1954 documentary "The Vanishing Prairie," for which federal predator and control agent George Barns trapped three live black-footed ferrets and released them into the Wind Cave National Park, S.D.

"With Disney-like visions of heroes and villains, my young mind could not yet wrap itself around the thought of enlisting the prairie dog exterminators to save the declining predator," Jachowski wrote. "I couldn't understand how biologists who were hired to kill, wholesale and without remorse, the single prey species on which ferrets depend, were at the same time trying to save the predator."

Ten years later, the federal government began giving serious consideration to predator control policies but by then there were few left to study. Ferrets require at least a 25-acre prairie dog colony but more likely a 100-acre colony, research found.

In October, 1966, the Endangered Species Preservation Act extended protection to the black-footed ferret and breeding efforts began — with no success. By 1980, all the captive ferrets in the breeding project had died, despite the work of leading experts. The last known wild ferret population, in Mellette County, S.D., vanished with the collapse of the prairie dog colony in 1974.

"Hope for the existence of black-footed ferrets was decreasing one large swath of prairie at a time" as the species was declared extirpated — and therefore the land was available for mining, plowing and developing.

Finally in 1981, a ranch dog named Shep in Meeteetse found what so many biologists had not, a black-footed ferret. Researchers counted 129 by 1984, enough that some could be captured and used for breeding. And then, as bickering over the specifics of a breeding program drug on, the population crashed to 16 by October 1985.

So six were captured and quickly died of canine distemper. Another six were captured, such a small population (eventually 18) it left the breeders with almost no margin of error and a genetic bottleneck. And no more ferrets were found around Meeteetse after March 1987.

"We now know that Shep found the last black-footed ferret population, and the species would likely have gone extinct, unnoticed without his help ... the fate of the species rested in a small number of captive animals," Jachowski wrote.

Fast forward to 1998, and Jachowski was at the University of Montana dreaming of studying big mammals when he landed an internship and then a job on the prairie in central Montana tracking a small group of ferrets just released into the wild along the Missouri River. After two years in the Peace Corps, he returned to Montana, arriving in Malta to work on a black-footed ferret breeding program.

Despite specialized equipment, a solid manual and diligence, Jachowski lost sleep every time a kit died.

"A single death when our output was already less than forty (kits) affected years of work and planning," he wrote.

Like most of the captive breeding programs outside Wyoming, the Malta project failed.

"Our three-year experiment, in which 132 ferrets were held in captivity at the Montana facility, resulted in forty-six mortalities and only produced six new individuals," he wrote. "We had failed even to make more ferrets in a controlled, test tube-like environment. Like a slap in the face, Malta had taught me that conservation was infinitely more delicate and difficult for ferrets than for wolves or grizzlies."

Jachowski took his work outside. He found reintroduction efforts near the UL Bend in Montana could maintain a few ferrets but had to keep augmenting their tiny populations with captive stock. A self-sustaining population seemed to require colonies of 23,000 prairie dogs, so efforts turned to moving prairie dog colonies into the area. And then politics got involved again. And plague came, wiping out prairie dog colonies in a blink.

In the million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, Jachowski pondered the quickly disappearing temperate grasslands "the most endangered ecosystem" on the continent.

"I hope that someday, in my lifetime, we might be able to restore the ferrets back here. To have the rarest eat the rare," he wrote. "It would take me hours to get anywhere with a name, but I am in the middle of everything."

He's hopeful the black-footed ferret will survive, though he acknowledged it will take significant public will to make it so.

"Black-footed ferrets represent the wild heart of the Great Plains in an increasingly modern and civilized age," Jachowski wrote. "Ferrets are that rare piece of the ecosystem puzzle that not only makes the prairie more noteworthy, but more complex and beautiful."